Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

Barack Obama

Text Publishing Company, Apr 7, 2008 - Biography & Autobiography - 464 pages

Before Barack Obama became a politician he was, among other things, a writer. Dreams From My Father is his masterpiece: a refreshing, revealing portrait of a young man asking the big questions about identity and belonging.

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama recounts an emotional odyssey. He retraces the migration of his mother's family from Kansas to Hawaii, then to his childhood home in Indonesia. Finally he travels to Kenya, where he confronts the bitter truth of his father's life and at last reconciles his divided inheritance.

'Dreams From My Father is a remarkable story...a journey of heart and mind into a family maelstrom of identity, class and race...in a literary tradition of political prose that goes back to another master of the American language: Abraham Lincoln.' Robert McCrum, Guardian

What people are saying

Review: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

User Review  - Jacob - Goodreads

Voted for the guy but hadn't read his book, am the worst citizen. In the introduction Obama says that he was initially going to write a different book, a collection of essays on race and legal issues ...

Review: Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

User Review  - Nathalie - Goodreads

Great book to understand the man behind the President.

About the author

Barack Obama was born in Honolulu in 1961. In his early twenties he found his vocation working among poor communities on the south side of Chicago. Later he went to law school at Harvard University, where he became the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In 1995 he published his memoir Dreams from My Father, which became a bestseller soon after it was reissued in 2004. Returning to Chicago, he was elected to the Illinois State Senate in 1996. Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, and later that year he was elected to the US Senate. His second book, The Audacity of Hope, was published in 2006 and became an immediate bestseller. In November 2008, Senator Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America, and in 2009 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama is married to Michelle, with whom he has two daughters, Sasha and Malia.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance
• Author: Barack Obama
• Publisher: Text Publishing Company, 2008
• ISBN: 1921776137, 9781921776137
• Length: 464 pages
• Subjects: Biography & Autobiography / General; Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs; Biography & Autobiography / Presidents & Heads of State